We're sure everyone remembers the folk wisdom that women needed to brush their hair one hundred times each night to make it shine, right? Well, once the prone woman on the punishment themed cover of 1957's Burlesque Jungle gets one hundred brush strokes of a different kind her butt will be shining too, bright red presumably. This is a republication of 1956's hardback Blonde Flames, about a Miami Beach burlesque queen known as Silver Venus and her rivalry with an upstart dancer. Considering Boyer got both a hardback and a republication out of this, we're surprised it's her only output. A sequel where Silver Venus bobby pins her rival's nipples seems like a no-brainer.

This lovely photo shows Doris Mitchell, a New York City showgirl and singer who was a member of Nils Thor Granlund's NTG Revue, a chorus line that was the first of its kind in Las Vegas, originating in 1943 at the El Rancho Hotel and Casino. The NTG Revue eventually came to New York City, where Mitchell presumably joined. But reviews were mixed, with some critics liking it, but a Variety scribe noting Granlund's habit of slapping the chorus girls on their asses, to which they rolled their eyes and drawled scripted quips like, “Ain't he a card?” Granlund was uncouth, but he was also famous and wealthy, so he got away with it. Sound like anyone you know? As far as Mitchell herself, this photo seems to be the only evidence of her career that exists.

We've talked before about Horwitz Publications' habit of using celebrities on its Carter Brown paperback covers. Previous examples include Elke Sommer, Joan Collins, and Senta Berger. Above you see another borrowed celeb—none other than Lili St. Cyr—fronting Brown's 1965 thriller Homicide Harem in a cone bra outfit that brings to mind the fashion of Jean Paul Gaultier. There's no doubt it's her. We've spent a lot of time on her and recognized her high arching eyebrows and cleft chin immediately. But just to assuage any doubts you may have, we found a photo of her wearing the same outfit (though with different shoes), which you see below. We think Horwitz used unlicensed handout photos of moderately famous stars to create their covers. Lili was pretty famous by 1955, but perhaps not in Australia, since she wasn't really in movies to the extent that anything she'd done would have played there. Possibly 1955's Son of Sinbad made it there, but we have no data on that. Anyway, we're still a bit baffled why Horwitz didn't just use local models. It isn't as if there has ever been a shortage of beautiful women down under. This will remain a mystery, we suspect.

Above and below, the cover and interior scans from pocket sized Dare magazine published this month in 1954, with several photos of Italian actress Sophia Loren—weirdly referred to as a "spaghetti-eating starlet"—as well of images of American burlesque dancers Lili St. Cyr, June Randy, Marjorie Vann, and Lee Sharon. Dare was launched as a normal sized magazine in May 1950 by New York City based Career, Inc., quickly switched to mini format, and lasted until the late 1960s. The cover promises shots of a Martian, but we're just showing you the girls. Enjoy.

The French had a wide array of nudie—er, we mean, art—magazines during the mid-century period, including Paris-Hollywood and Folies de Paris et de Hollywood, which are the two we’ve focused on up to now. Regal was another popular publication—digest sized, light on text, and put together by Éditions Extentia, an outfit based out of 38 Rue du Monte-Thabor in Paris that also published Sensations, Chi-Chis,Paris-Broadway, and Paris-Tabou. It was a far-flung enterprise, even distributing issues in distant French Indochina via the loftily named Société Franco-Asiatique located in Saigon. Or if one preferred, issues could be obtained direct from France through the use of “envoi discret,” or discreet shipping, by which we expect they mean in a plain brown wrapper. This issue of Regal, with its voyeur themed cover photo suggesting a woman spied through an open window, was published in 1952. We have twenty-five scans below.

This photo shows burlesque icon Lili St. Cyr today in 1964, leaving the Los Angeles courthouse where she had just divorced her sixth and final husband, Joseph Zomar, a special effects technician who had worked on such films as Space Probe Taurus and The Addams Family. The grounds for the split? St. Cyr said her man was drunk every night and always angry. Once knowledge leaked out to American women that drunkenness and anger were legit grounds for a split, the divorce rate shot up 50%. It's totally true—look it up.

French musical comedy looks at the follies, foibles and failures of a terminally chaotic burlesque production.

This beautiful and rare Japanese poster was made to promote the French burlesque comedy Ah! Les belles bacchantes, which was known in English by the titles Peek-a-Boo and Femmes de Paris. We managed to locate a copy and basically you get a musical about a local cop who decides to look into reports of sexual dancing at a local cabaret. The movie stars Louis de Funès as the cop, Colette Brosset as an aspiring dancer, and Les Bluebell Girls du Lido. The image on the poster features one of those Bluebell Girls personifying La nuit, or the Night, and as impressive as she looks on paper, you should see her in the movie. Other dancers portray the Sun, the Moon, and so forth. We'd go so far as to say that sequence alone was worth the time spent watching Ah! Les belles bacchantes. But is it actually a good movie? Sure—if you like ventriloquists, leopards, pratfalls, brawls, and sputtering doubletakes. In other words, it's very silly, and very likeable. It opened in France in 1954 and reached Japan yesterday in 1955.

We've been doing a lot on exotic dance of late, so keeping with that theme, above are two posters for Bal Tabarin, an American crime drama from Republic Pictures revolving around the Bal Tabarin cabaret in Paris. A Los Angeles secretary witnesses her boss's murder and flees to Paris to hide with a close friend. She's an aspiring singer, so naturally she soon receives a job offer from the owner of the cabaret. Add in a bit of romance and her Paris idyll is going better than expected, but the bad guys soon catch up to her, clued in by the many Paris postcards mailed to her apartment over the years. Standard ’50s drama with a good location gimmick and nice dance scenes, Bal Tabarin premiered today in 1952. But anyone going to Paris after that to visit the cabaret might have been disappointed. It closed in 1953.

Above, the cover and interior scans from the mid-century burlesque magazine Cancans de Paris, with Sophia Loren, Martine Beswick, Laya Raki, and Senta Berger, who the magazine mistakenly calls Santa. Well, ho ho ho—if you want to be even more naughty this Sunday click the links for the other two Cancans de Paris we posted here and here.

After being arrested two weeks earlier, topless burlesque dancer Carol Doda was acquitted of obscenity charges today in 1965, along with fellow dancers Yvonne D'Angers, Kay Star, and Euraine Heimberg. The above photo shows her standing outside San Francisco's Condor Club, where the arrest had taken place. The court case marked the legalization of topless dancing not just in San Fran, but helped usher in the practice elsewhere. Doda went on to push the envelope further when she graduated into totally nude dancing in 1969. Three years later the city passed an ordinance prohibiting total nudity in establishments that served alcohol. Such laws remain the norm even today in nearly the entirety of the U.S. Doda continued performing regularly until the 1980s, then opened a shop in San Francisco called Carol Doda's Champagne and Lace Lingerie Boutique. She died last year due to kidney failure. You can read a bit more about her trial and acquittal here.

United States Marines invade Nicaragua to support the U.S.-backed government installed there after José Santos Zelaya had resigned three years earlier. American troops remain for eleven years.

1936—Last Public Execution in U.S.

Rainey Bethea, who had been convicted of rape and murder, is hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky in what is the last public execution performed in the United States.

1995—Mickey Mantle Dies

New York Yankees outfielder Mickey Mantle dies of complications from cancer, after receiving a liver transplant. He was one of the greatest baseball players ever, but he was also an alcoholic and played drunk, hungover, and unprepared. He once said about himself, "Sometimes I think if I had the same body and the same natural ability and someone else's brain, who knows how good a player I might have been."

1943—Philadelphia Experiment Allegedly Takes Place

The U.S. government is believed by some to have attempted to create a cloak of invisibility around the Navy ship USS Eldridge. The top secret event is known as the Philadelphia Experiment and, according to believers, ultimately leads to the accidental teleportation of an entire vessel.

1953—Soviets Detonate Deliverable Nuke

The Soviet Union detonates a nuclear weapon codenamed Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Stalina, aka Stalin's Jet Engine. In the U.S. the bomb is codenamed Joe 4. It is a small yield fission bomb rather than a multi-stage fusion weapon, but it makes up for its relative weakness by being fully deployable, meaning it can be dropped from a bomber.

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